The Widow Jane Mine
The Widow Jane Mine. Nobody knows how it got its name. Jane—as well as any connection she might have had with this long-idle natural cement mine in Rosendale, New York—is lost to history. What...
Author: John P. O'Grady
Steepletop
Moldering books. The smell greets you as soon as you step into the house. Thousands of them are up there in the library, at the top of the stairs on the left side of...
Kindred Spirits
The painting is called Kindred Spirits. It was created by Asher B. Durand in 1849 to memorialize his close friend and fellow landscape artist Thomas Cole, who died unexpectedly the previous year. The two...
Saint Mary of the Mountain
The old cemetery sits on a small rise above the highway just east of the village of Hunter. Well over a century has passed since the last interment. The monuments—some of which are still...
Medusa Cemetery
A car pulls into the cemetery in Medusa, New York. Three people are inside the vehicle: two women—one younger, one middle-aged—and an old man wearing a hat. The middle-aged woman is driving, the old man...
The Refreshment Pavilion at Kaaterskill Falls
In 1825, a fellow by the name of Peter Schutt acquired a piece of property in the still-wild woolly wags of the Catskill Mountains. The purchase included a prominent waterfall. Two years earlier, the...
Artist Graveyards
Not long ago, I made a trip down the mountain and across the river to Columbia County to visit historic Hudson City Cemetery. I was looking for the grave of Sanford Robinson Gifford, who...
Fred the Artist
The artist Fred De Sawal had his studio in a ramshackle cottage along old Route 23 in Leeds, New York. It was located not far from the Jolly House resort, where some of his...
Hotel Kaaterskill
Hotel Kaaterskill was a house built of spite. Legend has it that in the summer of 1880, George F. Harding—a highly successful Philadelphia lawyer and habitué of the Catskill Mountain House—got into a row...
Poet’s Ledge
By John P. O’Grady At the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design in 1861, Sanford Robinson Gifford’s latest artwork was hailed as “the great picture of the season, the crowning glory of...